The Safes’ O’Malley
brothers find their redemption in the music of their garage-rock band.
From the time he was 3, Frankie O’Malley was always in trouble. “I did all kinds of bad things. I thought I could fly, so I jumped on the chandelier. I thought I was indestructible, so I jammed my finger into the crease of the door and got my finger chopped off,” says the singer, guitarist and drummer for the Safes, a 14-year-old Chicago garage-rock band. “I cut school. I did all the things little rascals were known to do.”
O’Malley survived. The finger, hanging by a tiny piece of skin, was reattached, leaving behind a small scar. The bad behavior morphed into something productive. “I was always in some kind of trouble, so rock ’n’ roll was a good path for me,” he says in a 35-minute phone interview from a tour stop in Fort Collins, Colo. “‘Grab a hammer and do something productive.’ ‘Well, I can hammer on instruments. How about that?’ ”
O’Malley is sheepish and a bit cryptic about his bad-boy origins. He tells a good story about something bad he did in his past, then immediately asks for it to be off the record because he doesn’t want anybody from said past to find out who was responsible. He won’t give his age and prefers not to name his suburban hometown or the high school he attended. At one point, he says, “I got in trouble with drugs and alcohol, all that stuff. I don’t know if I want to get into that. I’ve been sober for a long time. So I don’t know.”
He is most confident and assertive when talking about the redemptive power of music. The Safes, formed in 2003, are a band that features brothers Frankie, Michael and Patrick O’Malley, and they do short, punchy songs with hand claps, big guitars and little organ riffs, inspired by the Kinks and Cheap Trick. Their latest album, “Tasty Waves,” came out in September and lasts 22 minutes — no song is longer than 2 minutes, 59 seconds.
“Music helped me survive. It got me out of trouble,” Frankie O’Malley says. “It became almost all I wanted to do.”
“Tasty Waves” is an outgrowth of what he calls a “really elaborate artistic album,” with acoustic guitars, pianos and strings, which the band completed after 2014’s “Record Heat.” The band shopped the unreleased album, a departure from the Safes’ usual knock-it-out style, to indie record labels but received the same response every time: “This is really good, but how are you guys going to pull this off live?” Instead, the O’Malley brothers wound up focusing on nine songs for which Frankie had made stripped-down demo recordings. Patrick put them on one CD and said, “That’s a good album.”
Frankie O’Malley had trouble finishing the 10th song, “Streets and Sanitation,” so in a rare departure from their usual creative system, Patrick took it over. “I’m like, ‘That’s it!’ ” O’Malley recalls. “It would just be a poem on paper without Patrick.”
Early on, the Safes struggled over a traditional band conflict: Patrick, who has a college degree and interned at record labels big and small, wanted to tour everywhere, slowly building a fan base on the way to rock superstardom; Frankie didn’t think they were ready at first. Over time, they put out one album after another, beginning with 2003’s “Family Jewels,” and the two slowly agreed their albums were solid enough to tour behind.
“There were times Patrick was like, ‘If you want to do anything, you’ve got to go out of the city,’ and there were times I was like, ‘I don’t think we’re ready to do this.’ Until we were,” Frankie O’Malley recalls. “Yeah, there was tension! A, we’re in a band. And B, we’re brothers. But more importantly, we agreed with each other.”